1. Text

2. The role of text today
With the explosion of the Internet (WWW), text has become more important than ever
HTML has developed a lot over the years to correspond to needs of multimedia
(HTML 1.0 -> HTML > XHTML 1.0 -> XHTML 1.1 -> HTML 5)
Academic papers, magazine articles, manuals and even books end up to web
Web is a richer medium than the paper pages on a book
XHTML 1.1 – Module based XHTML; W3C recommendation was published in May 2001
Do you prefer printed newspapers over web versions? What about magazines?

3. Text on the web
Web is an author’s paradise: millions of potential readers even for a personal web site (people want to share their experiences)
For readers web offers millions of pages full of content
As technologies have improved (higher bandwidth, more multimedia elements embedded within web documents), design issues are not a common problem anymore
Key questions when publishing material online: Who is the audience? What words should I use?

4. Text in multimedia
Probably the most important part of multimedia productions
Can be visible such as text on a web site
Can be invisible such as a script for a computer game
Text (script) is the main content and content is always the king; with no content there is no multimedia production

5. The power of meaning
Every word has many meanings: be careful when choosing words; words in titles, menus and navigation are very important for user experience
Go back vs. previous, quit vs. close; what’s the difference?
Be careful! Always make sure that typing and spelling errors don’t end up in the final product!
Any strange experiences with words in multimedia products?

6. About fonts and faces
A typeface: a family of characters that usually includes many types of sizes and styles
A font: a collection of characters of a single size and style belonging to a particular typeface family
So usually when you say ”change the font” you mean actually ”change the typeface”

7. About fonts and faces Typical font styles are bold and italic
Type sizes are expressed in points: one point is inches or about 1/72 of an inch
The font’s size is the distance from the top of the capital letters to the bottom of the descenders in letters as in y or g
Arial, Times and Courier are typefaces; Times 12-point italic is a font
In computer world people often speak about fonts when typeface or face would be correct!

8. Using text in multimedia
Menus for navigation: Choose a topic, click on it, get there
Buttons for interaction: objects that make things happen when they are clicked
Fields for reading: text content
Symbols and icons: text in form of stand-alone graphic components; treat them as text because they carry a meaning
Animating text: Can be used to retain the a viewer’s attention; don’t overdo special effects or they will become boring
Text is a lot harder to read on the screen than in a hard copy: try to present to the user only few paragraphs of text on one page!

9. Character sets
The ASCII character set: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange
a 7-bit character coding system
commonly used in the USA and abroad
Assigns a number or value to 128 characters (both upper- and lowercase + some special symbols)
Includes some 32 control characters for device control messages (line feed, tab etc)

10. Character sets The Extended character set An 8-bit character set
Extends the ASCII set by using the extra bit
The extra bit is commonly filled with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) characters that include often-used symbols and characters, such as ä or ñ
Also known as ISO-Latin-1 character set
Used when programming web pages with HTML

11. Character sets Unicode
A solution for handling international language alphabets
16-bit
Accommodates up to about characters
Shared symbols of each language are unified into collections of symbols (called scripts)
A bit complex system
Too complex to explain in this content

12. Languages The English alphabet: 26 letters
The Scandinavian alphabet: 29 letters
The kanji alphabet (japanese): more than 3000 kanas (letters, or whole words)
All languages, from Navajo to Hebrow, have their own unique alphabets

13. Font editing and designing tools
There are lots of shareware and even freeware font editing programs that can be used together with commercial graphics software
A popular Macromedia Fontographer supports almost all platforms
Other: TypeStyler, Cool 3D, some plugins for Photoshop (TypeCaster, HotTEXT)